A Short History of France eBook

Louis XV. was five years old when, in 1715, he became
heir to a throne absolutely rigid. The best
work of Richelieu and Mazarin and Louis XIV. had been
expended upon it. Absolutism could go no farther.
The king was all; next below him a fawning, obsequious
nobility, and then that vague entity known as “the
people,” a remote invisible force, sustaining
the weight of the splendid pyramid, the apex of which
was this boy of five.

The young Louis was being prepared to sit upon this
giddy elevation. The Duke of Orleans, his accomplished
cousin, a competent instructor in vice, was chosen
as regent, and the royal education began. The
best and rarest of the world’s culture was at
his service. Fenelon, the polished ecclesiastic,
fed him the classics in tempting form from his own
Telemaque, written for the purpose. Although
this work was later suppressed by the boy’s
royal father under the suspicion of being a covert
satire upon his own reign, in which Madame de Montespan
was represented by Calypso; and other famous or infamous
members of his court also appeared in thin disguise.

The handsome boy was breathing the atmosphere of genius
created by an age which compares well with those of
Pericles and Augustus and the Medici, and nourished
at the same time by the exhalations from a new crop
of vices growing out of the decaying remains of those
left by the old court.

CHAPTER XIV.

Such was the preparation for a supreme crisis in the
life of the Kingdom.

The enormous debt left by the last reign taxed the
ingenuity of the regent to its utmost. Then
it was that John Law, the Scotchman, presented his
great financial scheme of making unlimited wealth out
of paper, which was just what the regent needed.
The collapse came quickly, in 1720, bringing ruin
to thousands, and leaving the country in more desperate
need than before.

When declared of age, in 1723, a marriage was arranged
for Louis with Marie Leczinska, daughter of the exiled
Polish King Stanislas. Europe at this time was
agitated over the succession to the throne of Austria,
as the empire was now called. The Salic Law excluded
female heirs, and the emperor, Charles VI., had died
in 1718, leaving only a daughter, Maria Theresa, one
year old. But a pragmatic sanction, once more
invoked, seems to have covered the necessities of the
situation by providing that the succession in the
absence of a male heir might descend to a female,
and so there was a young and beautiful empress on
the throne at Vienna, who was going to make a great
deal of history for Europe; and who would open her
brilliant reign by a valiant fight for possession
of Silesia, which the young king of Prussia intended
to seize as an addition to his own new kingdom.
This young King Frederick was also making history
very fast, and after a stormy career was going to
convert his Kingdom into a Power, and to be the one